[Last year, I ran a quick post on Tim Hardaway in Miami and his killer crossover move. Here’s a follow-up, really a prequel, on Hardaway during his second NBA season with Golden State, pointing out first that the headline is no hype. Hardaway jumped from a solid 14.7 points and 8.7 assists per game as a rookie to 27.9 points and 9.7 assists per game as a sophomore. As one preseason basketball magazine wrote of Hardaway’s year two:
Hardaway, kinetic energy from tipoff to final buzzer, may be the best penetrator in the league. His crossover dribble has become as renowned as it is unstoppable. After breaking down a defense, he passes creatively. When surrounded, he exudes remarkable cool. Most of Hardaway’s turnovers are a result of taking chances only great players will take. He is disruptive on defense with the quickness to overplay his man, or wander and recover in time.
The article below, published in the April 1992 issue of Basketball Digest, adds detail to the positive description above. As the San Francisco Examiner’s John Hillyer details, Hardaway’s success was built on a firm foundation of high character, supreme confidence, hard work, and a love of the game.]
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The crossover dribble is the point guard’s friend—or enemy, if he doesn’t have one. It’s a maneuver that can help him lose his defender and knife through traffic to lay the ball up or kick it out to an open teammate.
Golden State’s Tim Hardaway is “the best crossover dribbler I ever saw,” says a man who has seen a few. That man is the Lakers’ Magic Johnson, and he was talking about a fellow playmaker who is in only his second season as a pro.
It was just the latest in a spate of accolades suddenly washing over Hardaway. Johnson never told Hardaway what he told members of the media about him before a Lakers-Warriors game earlier this season, but Hardaway knows the admiration is there.
“He’ll say, ‘Good move,’ or ‘way to get it,’ or that he can tell that I’ve been working on it,” Hardaway says. “Everybody’s friendly in this game. It’s nice to be friends with Magic, Isiah [Thomas], Michael Jordan, people like that.”
How much longer will it be before players are thinking of their friendship with Hardaway as a status symbol? Already, learned observers are starting to ease him into the NBA point guard pantheon with Magic, Isiah, Kevin Johnson, and John Stockton. These observers include Warriors vice president and former coach Al Attles, who faced all the greats of a previous era, from Oscar Robertson on down.
“You’ve got the quintessential best point guards,” Attles says. “Then you’ve got the good point guards. And I think Timmy was always in the area of the good point guards. I don’t think there’s any question you have to raise him to the next level now.
“I’m not saying where he ranks, but he’s certainly got to be compared favorably with those guys. Does he do for his team what they do for their teams? I think you’d have to say yes.”
Hardaway erased any lingering doubts on that score when he delivered Golden State’s final 13 points in a one-point victory over the Sacramento Kings earlier in the season.
“When you need things to get done, he does those things,” Attles says. “He raises his level of confidence at times like that. Do you realize that if he misses any one of those shots late in the game, including the free throws, we lose the game? And the key to him it is, I’m sure he never thought about it.”
He never did. “You’ve got to take them and not worry about them,” Hardaway says. “You don’t plan on missing; you plan on making every shot. That’s why in the summer you’ve got to work on shots. Like in that game [against Sacramento]—I worked on all those shots during the summer.”
Funny, dwelling so much on a point guard’s shooting when his job is to help other people get shots. And Hardaway is doing that, too; he ranks among the league leaders in assists. But if a point guard can’t shoot, he can’t do much of anything else in the NBA, where the opponents will exploit weaknesses that you might not even know you have. And Hardaway was perceived as a shaky shooter coming out of college, which is why the Warriors were able to draft him 14th overall in the first round of the 1989 draft.
Hardaway throws a spinless outside shot that has all the buoyancy of a cannonball and looks just awful when it misses. But he shot 47.1 percent as a rookie in 1989-90, respectable enough that defenders couldn’t ignore him.
“I like my shot,” says Hardaway, bristling a bit. “I feel like I can shoot it any time in the game and make it. A lot of people try to change it, but I’m going to be making it throughout my career. The only thing I can do is make it better, and that’s what I’m doing.”
Attles was especially amazed at one of Hardaway’s fourth-quarter shots in that win over Sacramento. It was a short hook over three defenders, including a leaping Ralph Sampson, who at 7-feet-4 is at least 16 inches taller than Hardaway.
“That comes from just playing in Chicago when I was little, playing against bigger people, older people, shooting over them,” Hardaway says. “I just can’t think about it, that’s all.”
As for that crossover dribble, Hardaway says he learned it as a college sophomore watching Dwayne (Pearl) Washington on television. “It’s very effective, and a lot of people like it,” says Hardaway. “It creates oohs and ahs, and it looks good.”
The kid does have style, and when Warriors coach Don Nelson said he was turning the team over to him this season, making Hardaway “his eyes on the floor,” the style was given official substance. “That’s the biggest thing for me this year,” Hardaway says. “He gives me the confidence to run a play. He’ll say: ‘OK, that’s a good play to run. Let’s run it.’ If we need a score, I’ll call out a number. He can change it, and sometimes he does, but sometimes he doesn’t because it’s the right play.”
Another innovation: those initials, “MEE” that Hardaway prints on the back of the sneakers. They honor his grandmother, Minnie E. Eubanks, who died last summer. She taught me to be the best person that I can be,” says Hardaway. “If I’m going to play anything, do anything, just become the best, whatever I’m going to do.”
She taught him well.
From Way Downtown 